Associate Director, Production

About Macmillan Publishers

Macmillan Publishers is a global trade book publishing company with prominent imprints around the world, publishing award‑winning books for children and adults in all categories and formats.

About the Role

The Associate Director, Production manages a production team for the Celadon, Flatiron, and Holt imprints. This role oversees first‑print production and manufacturing activities, coaches the team through workflows, and manages a title list of its own while liaising with editorial, design, and art.

What you’ll do

• Manage a medium‑sized title list, ensuring priority titles move smoothly through the production and manufacturing process.
• Supervise and coach the production team across all production and manufacturing aspects—including scheduling, prepress, estimating, printing, binding for text & components, and seasonal launch tasks.
• Maintain high quality standards, coaching the team and managing vendors, reviewing projects to ensure excellence.
• Ensure production managers comply with corporate workflows and procedures, enter project data into systems (Biblio and RSuite), contract with vendors using approved scales, archive, and close out projects.
• Collaborate with internal stakeholders to provide editorial with product delivery options, investigate manufacturing options for print materials, and keep projects on track in terms of schedule, budget, and quality.
• Attend weekly status meetings with managing editorial, production editorial, design, and art to track title progress.
• Coordinate with internal customers on project details and departmental protocols, helping teams set priorities.
• Maintain strong vendor relationships, negotiate prices for non‑contract projects, ensure vendor compliance with Macmillan contracts, evaluate vendor performance, and oversee quality control reviews, issue resolution.

What you’ll bring

• Ability to prioritize and adapt to changes, delays, and unexpected events; anticipate, identify, and resolve problems promptly.
• Working knowledge of Biblio and Google platform is a plus.

Ideal Experience

• 15 years of book production experience.
• Excellent knowledge of all facets of book production and manufacturing.
• Highly organized and detail‑minded.
• Understanding of the overall publishing business and how production issues affect company success; experience in people management is a plus.

This role will have an annual salary of $100,000 – $110,000.

Equal Opportunity Employer

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are actively seeking job applicants who reflect a broad representation of differences, including race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, physical ability, neurodiversity, age, family status, economic background and status, geographical background and status, and perspective. We believe the best companies reflect the incredible diversity in viewpoints, backgrounds, and identities of the world in their staffs, and are committed to inclusive hiring across departments and levels. The successful candidate for this position will be an employee of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.